Economic Actors in the Work of Madame Justice Wilson

One cannot discuss corporate or tax law, or indeed any law for that matter, in a value vacuum. How we interpret, analyse and assess factual situations and the legal analysis of them will differ depending upon our individual, and occasionally, collective or societal perspectives. In the economic sphere, a great deal depends upon one's world view of the primary economic actors in our society - corporations; and the main economic laws - the tax laws. At the outset I should state that a major reason for my disagreement with some of Justice Wilson's decisions is due to the fact that, on some occasions, Madame Justice Wilson and I hold different views of the role of corporate entities in our society and even conceptual differences as to what a corporation is legally. At the risk of being overly simplistic, I believe that the differences for the most part can be traced to the conflict between the feminist view of the role of corporations as part of a system of social and economic cooperation and the conflicting view of the corporation as the objective icon fueling a patriarchal driven free market economy as espoused by one of the leaders of the scottish enlightenment - Adam Smith. Such different world views also results in differing methodologies for solving problems, legal and otherwise.